George S. Patton

George Smith Patton Jr. (11 November 1885-21 December 1945) was a General of the US Army who commanded the US Seventh Army in the Mediterranean theater of World War II and the US Third Army in France and Germany following D-Day. Patton was known for his colorful image, his hard-driving personality, and his success as a commander, and he became an American folk hero.

Biography
George Smith Patton Jr. was born in San Gabriel, California in 1885, and he graduated from West Point in 1909 and joined the staff of General John J. Pershing, with whom he fought in Mexico in 1916 and France in 1917. Between World War I and World War II he became an expert on tank warfare, and in World War II commanded a corps in North Africa and then the US Seventh Army in Sicily. He temporarily lost his command in 1943 after a publicized incident in which he hit a soldier suffering from battle fatigue. This was doubly unfortunate since his warfare was always concerned with making sure that he protected all of his men as much as humanly possible and the incident conveyed an apparent callousness that was not present. In 1944, Patton returned to lead the US Third Army at D-Day and in the Battle of Normandy. He continued in a spectacular sweep through France, across the Rhine, and into Czechoslovakia. As military governor of Bavaria, he was criticized and relieved of his command in October 1945 for his leniency toward Nazis. He was critically injured in an automobile accident on 8 December 1945, and he died in a hospital in Heidelberg on 21 December at the age of 60.